king for work or the nearest casual ward--just as though there was
no such virtue as thrift in the world.

The particular function of the British lodging-house--though the
science of economics is silent on this point--is to use up the last
strength of the trusty old servant and the plucky widow. These people
will invest from two or three hundred to a thousand pounds in order to
gain a bare subsistence by toiling for boarders and lodgers. It is
their idea of a safe investment. They can see it all the time. All
over England this process goes on. The curious inquirer may see every
phase for himself by simply looking for rooms among the apartment
houses of such a region as Camden Town, London; he will realize more
and more surely as he goes about that none of these people gain money,
none of them ever recover the capital they sink, they are happy if
they die before their inevitable financial extinction. It is so
habitual with people to think of classes as stable, of a butcher or a
baker as a man who keeps a shop of a certain sort at a certain level
throughout a long and indeterminate life, that it may seem incredible
to many readers that those two typically thrifty classes, the
lodging-letting householder and the small retailer, are maintained by
a steady supply of failing individuals; the fact remains that it is
so. Their little savings are no good to them, investments and business
beginnings mock them alike: steadily, relentlessly our competitive
system eats them up.

It is said that no class of people in the community is more hostile to
Socialism and Socialistic legislation than these small owners and
petty investors, these small ratepayers. They do not understand. Rent
they consider in the nature of things like hunger and thirst; the
economic process that dooms the weak enterprise to ruin is beyond the
scope of their intelligence; but the rate-collector who calls and
calls again for money, for more money, to educate "other people's
children," to "keep paupers in luxury," to "waste upon roads and light
and trams," seems the agent of an unendurable wrong. So the poor
creatures go out pallidly angry to vote down that hated thing
municipal enterprise, and to make still more scope for that big
finance that crushes them in the wine-press of its exploitation. It is
a wretched and tragic antagonism, for which every intelligent
Socialist must needs have sympathy, which he must meet with
patience--and lucid explanations. If the